


Salvage

by englishable



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-31
Updated: 2016-01-31
Packaged: 2018-05-17 10:01:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5864911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rey has spent her life seeing things in terms of parts, in terms of what is worth saving and what will need to be left behind; it's merely a scavenger's unsentimental eye for detail, and she's rather proud of it. But people are different, because seeing them as a whole rather than as individual pieces can change everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Salvage

...

She’s an expert collector of contingencies, which is really just a polite way of saying how she never outright throws anything away due to the firm, chronic suspicion that it might be needed at some later time.

And so Rey walks around wearing two or three broken droid antennae in her hair, taking them down for repair work during any spare moments she has. She permanently borrows cups from the mess hall, each one filled to its brim with cold water, and then lines them up along her windowsill without drinking a single drop.  She gathers bare copper wires, used batteries, stripped screws, loose jacket threads unraveled on door hinges.

One could also call it a scavenger’s eye for detail – an objective, provisional valuation of parts, separable from the whole, and this is perhaps the most worthwhile thing Rey has taken away with her from Jakku.

Which explains several things, where Ben Solo is concerned.

Or not. 

Because first there’s that long, steeply-pitched nose, broader in the middle than at its bridge. There’s the soft and petulant mouth, the narrow jaw, the sparse brows, the haphazard freckles, the ranginess of his limbs, those facetious and defenseless ears that he carefully preens his hair to cover. 

His eyes are dark brown, ringed about their edges with amber like the crown around a solar eclipse, and of course there is the scar.

( _Creature in a mask_ , she’d called him once, back when he still wore it to match the false name, so he’d taken it off to show her – what? All Rey had seen was a half-grown boy pretending he was a man, or else trying to forget it.

In the end, he hadn’t been able to do either.)

And if Rey merely looks at these individual, divided parts, alongside her memories of all the things he has done, she can think about how ridiculous she’s being. 

Stupid, foolish, truly and madly absurd –

Then Ben Solo presses his face against the curve of her neck and sighs, deep and solemn as though he’s just set down a heavy burden. A charge goes up her spine and arms like the premonition of a storm.

“You’ve been silent a while,” he says. “What are you thinking?”

“Plotting, more likely.”

“Plotting, then.”

“Why? Can’t you look for yourself?”

“I’ve come to enjoy the prospect of not hearing other thoughts besides my own. It’s still an interesting novelty.” His mouth stays near the pulse in her throat. “And it would mean something different if you told me.”

He is slightly too tall for the bed they’re lying on, his legs folded up, his left arm no doubt full of static numbness where it’s pinned beneath her shoulders, but he remains perfectly motionless all the same. They are both still wearing their clothes from the day before, save for the bare feet; Rey’s boots have been tossed into two different corners, while Ben’s sit neatly beside each other in a posture of soldierly attention. Morning light turns green and scattered as it filters through plants and water glasses at her window. 

Rey slides one hand up his back, over a shirt that covers old wounds she had healed to save him and older ones she had inflicted in her various attempts to kill him.

(There are other scars, as well, deeper down, in places she’ll never be able to see or reach. 

Those are the things he must live with for himself, must carry in his mind and heart, and Rey occasionally considers the terrible strength this demands of him – the same strength that has left him with a mind and heart at all, really, after everything.)

She reaches with her other hand and runs it through his hair, along the shell of his ear, down his cheek. It is a brisk, appraising gesture. He sighs again, fractal-scarred skin and knitted bones and still-breathing lungs and living blood all collected here in her arms. 

Ridiculous. 

“It’s nothing,” Rey says, with admonishing clarity. “I was just wondering why you’d ever want to hide this face beneath a mask.”

Ben laughs, almost.  

“I’m not especially intimidating without it.”

“I know. I’m rather fond of that.” 

(And Jedi must see things as a whole, anyway, putting all the separate pieces together. 

Something usually changes when you allow this to happen.)

...


End file.
